“I am seeing this so you don’t have to!”
This 2012 rebuke from war correspondent Marie Colvin to her London editor, as she returned to die in the horrors of Syria, is the best description of journalism I ‘ve ever heard. “A Private War,” Matt Heineman’s morally fierce new film about Colvin, reminds us that some people give up everything, trying to give us the truth.
How terrible then, for so many Americans to live in a world of deliberate lies. It is inevitable that the Trump-Fox News bubble will burst, as our country faces the real impacts of climate change, Russian cyberwarfare, economic inequality and Republican corruption. I feel sorry for the genuine conservatives out there who have made this devil’s bargain with Trump. If history is any guide, the gains they have made will be threatened, if not reversed, by the coming wave of revulsion.
While Colvin’s retort was about war, it could apply also to the tedious journalism of court documents, transcripts, government fine print, and data of all kinds that reporters plow through to figure out what’s true. The public can see this evidence for themselves, if they want to do this investigation of documents in plain sight. But who wants to take the time? So thank goodness nonprofit and for-profit mainstream reporters all over the world, including The New York Times and Washington Post, Propublica, The New Yorker and the Atlantic—are doing this for us. Check out the Post’s summary Dec. 3 report about the Mueller investigations, based on actual court convictions and guilty pleas.
I won’t be going to see the film about Gary Hart, not because I think the press was always terrific in covering him, but because I think they did an honest job outing his hypocrisy and weirdness. Matt Bai, who wasn’t there at the time and has a gauzy view of how Hart might have served as president, has done a disservice to history. Hart was a hypocrite and a liar. He was no Donald Trump, to be sure. But looking back to say he would have been a great president, and setting it up to blame the media, is a waste of everyone’s time.
Instead see “A Private War,” where an imperfect—crazy and sometimes out of control—journalist does the job. That is the real story.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/politics/2012/08/marie-colvin-private-war